Drowning Ruth

  He'd opened his eyes at the sound of groaning. It was Pete McKinley, about twenty feet away, struggling to pick himself up. Between them, Henny Sims lay in a heap, unmoving. Carl was about to call to McKinley when he saw the man stiffen, an odd, horrified look on his face. He followed McKinley's gaze to the rim of the foxhole. Three Huns were staring down at them, bayonets affixed.

  His body started involuntarily, but the Germans didn't even glance his way. They must have assumed he was dead, or at least still unconscious. Already they were clambering into the foxhole, moving toward McKinley, who'd managed to get to his knees. One of them stopped where Sims was heaped and used his bayonet to roll him onto his back. There was something wrong with Sims, Carl could see. Something funny about his head. “ Tot,” the Heinie said, and Carl realized that half of Henny's head was missing.

  “My gun,” Carl thought, and he believed he was reaching for it, believed even that he was standing, ready to fire it into their backs, but it was only an illusion. His body stayed frozen, stuck to the earth.

  And then red. That was how this dream that wasn't a dream always ended, with red that washed everything else away.

  It was still dark when the door slammed, and Amanda came in, cheeks pink, feet stamping, the milking done.

  “Ready for breakfast?” she asked, sticking her head around his door. Cold clouded around her, and she blew on her fingertips.

  Ruthie was already at the table by the time he'd made his way into the kitchen and collapsed on a chair. Like a dog guarding its food, she kept her eyes on Carl as she scooped cornflakes into her mouth, her fist clutched awkwardly around her spoon. Amanda cracked eggs smartly against the edge of a blue enamel bowl.

  “If you want to visit her grave first thing, Rudy'll take you,” she said. “Ruth is all set to go along, aren't you, Ruthie?” She wiped the girl's face with a dishrag and lifted her down from her chair.

  The thought startled him. He realized he'd been half imagining Mathilda away somewhere, visiting a cousin, or perhaps living in the island house. He was almost expecting her to return.

  “I really don't think I'm up to it.”

  “Oh, but, Carl,” she reproached him, “you really should. What will people think? And here,” she added, stepping out to the porch and coming back with a handful of branches studded with red berries. “I thought you might want to take these. I know they aren't really flowers, but you can't be choosy this time of year.”

  Ruth stood on her tiptoes and reached her arms high. “Pretty,” she said, “pretty.”

  “No, no, honey. These aren't for you. See, they've got thorns.” She pricked her finger and a red bead of blood appeared. She held it up for Ruth to see as if it were a prize.

  Ruth

  “Ho,” he said, and Frenchie stopped. I saw over the wall where all the stones were.

  “Hup,” Rudy said, and I was in the air, and then I was on the snow.

  The snow was hard, like crackers. There were no footprints on it. I was careful. I slid my feet. I tried not to let the snow break. The man that was my daddy let me. He didn't make me hurry. He punched the snow with his canes. Punch, step. Punch, step. I wished I had a cane.

  We went past the mean gray stones and the stone that was sleeping and the one with the boat. I knew the way. Aunt Mandy and I had been here lots of times. We went up the hill, then down the other side. We went to the stone that said my mama's name. It had shiny ice all over it.

  He said, “Mathilda,” and I knew he meant my mama.

  I looked behind the stone like I always did. Aunt Mandy said she was there, too, but I never saw her.

  “Where is she?” Aunt Mandy would never tell me, but maybe he would.

  “In heaven,” he said, that same old answer that wasn't any good to me. And he was crying.

  I cried then, too, because he was crying. “Then why don't we go there and get her?”

  Heaven was the place where we lived with Aunt Mandy, before my mama never came back.

  “Someday you will,” he said, “but not for a very long time.”

  I put my hand on the slippery ice stone. I slid my mitten over it, back and forth. I waited for him to say better get home. But he just stayed kneeling in the snow.

  “Why did she go to heaven?”

  “She drowned, Ruth. She went under the water and she couldn't get back up.”

  So then I knew that I was right. Heaven was the place where we had lived, because that was where the water was.

  “She drowned me too,” I said. “The baby was crying and crying.”

  “What baby?”

  “The ice baby. When Aunt Mandy didn't wait for us.”

  “What are you talking about? When didn't Amanda wait for you?”

  “When I drowned.”

  He was crying and he was smiling. “Don't worry, Ruth.” He wiped the crying off his face and put his hand on my head. “You didn't drown. You're right here with me.”

  I was here, but he wasn't there. So how did he know?

  When Carl returned with Ruth from the churchyard, he got back into bed and stayed there. Amanda opened the curtains each morning, registering her disapproval with every yank on the fabric.

  “Ready?” she asked, but she didn't mean it as a question.

  Surprisingly, after the first few times, he was ready. Twice a day, morning and evening, she unceremoniously threw back the blankets, exposing him to the chilly air, and scrubbed his wounded leg with brisk efficiency. Then she bent the leg, twisted it, pushed and prodded it with her long, thin fingers, until he yelped in pain.

  “Oh, for pity's sake,” she said, “bite on a pillow if you must make that noise. We can't have you scaring Ruth.” And as she wrapped honey-covered cloths around the hole, she warned him, “I'll have to keep this up until you start doing for yourself.”

  He nodded and promised to try, but he had no interest in making himself better. It was all he could do to sit in a chair and eat the coddled eggs and soup she brought him, while she pounded his pillows into fluffiness and changed his sheets, snapping the clean linen once or twice in the air, before she allowed it to settle around the mattress.

  She scared him. He knew she disapproved of him, that she hadn't thought him good enough for her sister. He'd tried to woo her with the birdhouse, but it hadn't worked, and Mattie had cried the day she'd had to carry it back home from the train. He knew she didn't want to talk about how Mathilda had died, but the pain in his leg made him angry and bold.

  “Amanda,” he said one night when she came in with his medicine, “why were you living on the island?”

  She looked straight at him with her hard, blue eyes. “Why, Carl, that was your home. Of course, that was where Mattie wanted to be. Did you take your medicine?”

  “Yes. But why did she leave it, then? Where did she go?” Carl pushed himself up, so he was sitting tall against the pillows. “You know what I don't understand,” he continued, without pausing to let Amanda answer, “why she would've left Ruth. Why would she have left Ruth in the house at night alone?”

  “Ruth wasn't alone, Carl. She was with me.” Amanda went to the window and stood with her back to him, her form reflected in the dark glass. “Besides, you know how reckless she was, Carl. Mattie was always taking chances, always doing things she shouldn't have done, things I told her not to do. She probably thought it was a fine night for skating and didn't think to test the ice. That would be just like her.” She pulled the curtains closed and turned to face him.

  “Was she wearing her skates, then? When they found her?”

  An exasperated sound escaped Amanda's lips and she swept her hand through the air. “She's dead, Carl. What does it matter?”

  “But … I loved her,” was all he could think to say. “Why can't I know?” He knew he sounded like a little boy, but he couldn't help himself.

  “If you loved her, you should understand. Love makes you do things and afterward you wish …” Her face was so hard and bitter, it scared Carl and made him c
lench the blanket to his chest. “But then it's too late. You can only be sorry.” Her mood changed, and she patted his feet, briskly, while he forced himself to hold them steady under her hand. “I've got something I'll bet you'd like to see.”

  She went out of the room, but before he could relax, she was back. “Here,” she said, opening a scrapbook on his lap, where it pressed against his sore leg. “Look. It was in the newspaper. This should tell you what you want to know.”

  She stopped at the door on her way out. “Carl,” she said, “I know you're sorry you left her.” And then she left him alone.

  The clippings seemed to Carl to have nothing to do with his Mathilda. They told him nothing that mattered, nothing that explained. Mathilda disappearing in the night—it didn't make sense to him. And what did Amanda mean about his being sorry and people doing things for love? Had Mathilda done something desperate because he'd gone? She'd begged him to stay, but wasn't that what every wife would do, and they didn't all drown. Near what he now knew was the end of her life, he hadn't gotten the letters from her he'd expected, but that was the Army's fault, wasn't it? No, he couldn't imagine Mathilda drowning herself for love of him. He'd have to ask Amanda more questions, someday when she was in a better mood and when he felt stronger. Perhaps, he mused sleepily, it had been some other woman they'd found frozen. And maybe tomorrow or the next day or the day after that Mathilda would come back.

  She would stand right there in the doorway, looking … how would she look? He'd been away from her so long, already his memory had lost the range of her expressions. He could summon her only in a few guises—glimpses of her face that for no particular reason had stuck in his mind. He flipped backward through the album—Mathilda bent over baby Ruth with an adoring smile; Mathilda both proud and amused, posing with her ankles neatly crossed for their wedding portrait; Mattie, her lank hair escaping her braids, third from the left in a grade school photograph; baby Mattie on her father's lap. He looked through a clutch of pictures no one had bothered to mount that had been pinched between the pages and the back cover. In one, Mattie and Amanda sat on the edge of the porch. Mattie was looking away from the camera, her eyes narrowed like a cat's, as if she were trying to make out some form in the distance. Carl pretended she was gazing beyond the border of the photograph at him.

  He wouldn't have called her reckless. Impulsive, maybe. Willful, certainly. And decisive. He remembered her haste to marry, once she'd accepted his proposal. But she was never crazy. He couldn't imagine her wandering onto thin ice in the middle of the night. But as he closed the book, Carl reminded himself that in the last couple years he'd seen people do many things he could never have imagined. Sometimes there was no knowing what people would do. She was gone anyway. He wouldn't see her again. Burying his head in his pillow, Carl waited for his dream.

  Carl's wound interested Amanda. It was the kind she hadn't seen often at the hospital, the kind that would get better despite the infections that had slowed its healing. She hadn't expected that he wouldn't want to improve, but it didn't matter much. His body went on about its business all the same, oozing its cleansing pus and growing its scars. He didn't have any say in the matter.

  During the day Ruth nosed around the door of Carl's room, curious as a cat. Often, when he opened his eyes, he would see her face pressed to the crack between the door and the doorframe, staring at him. When she was sure he'd seen her, she scurried away.

  She began to bring him bits from outside. She set them on the end of the bed when she thought he was sleeping: an oak gall, three pine cones, a railroad spike, a cardinal's feather. She lured him out.

  “Where did you find this?” he asked.

  At first she said nothing. And then she said, “Outside.” And at last she said, “Do you want to go outside?”

  “No.”

  But finally, on one of those days when spring blusters its way through a chink in winter, when the sky was a soft blue and water rushed through the ditches, he changed his mind. He'd been watching Ruth from his bed as she ran and slid through the slush and soggy grass in the backyard, chasing the ducks and geese with her arms spread wide. Impulsively, he reached for one of his canes and tapped on the glass. Startled, she turned toward the window. He waved, and she, still running, raised a hand to wave back. And somehow, well, it was no great surprise, the ground being slippery and uneven, her coordination still not fully formed, she lost her balance and went down hard.

  He was up and out of bed before he thought, and then, when the black dizziness swarmed over his eyes, he was just as quickly down again. It passed, and he struggled to his feet. Staggering and swaying, leaning heavily on both canes, Carl made his way out the door to rescue his little girl. But if he expected to find her sobbing on the ground, he didn't know Ruth. Long before he was back on his feet, she was darting at the duck who had waddled close to see what sort of creature had made such a splat. Her grin, her baby teeth shockingly white in the midst of her muddy face, was the last thing Carl saw before one cane slid right, the other left, and he found himself sprawling and crawling through the slush in his nightshirt, with Ruth standing over him, delighted with his clever trick.

  “What you do, Daddy? What you do?”

  Amanda laughed when she met them, soaked and filthy, struggling in the back door, but she soon set her mouth in a firm line. After all, Carl had to be made to realize the extra work he'd created, gallivanting around with Ruth. It wasn't bath day, but she'd have to heat water now, and the state of their clothes meant a morning's struggle over the washtub, and she doubted if even that would be enough to get Ruth's coat clean.

  Every day, from then on, Carl and Ruth went out to play together, and Amanda, going about her tasks, found herself half irritated and half charmed when she came upon them making snow angels or racing sticks in the freezing ditch water. She had to admit that it wasn't altogether unpleasant to have Carl around, even though he wasn't much help with the chores. If he were to stay through the fall, she could get the farm working well again, and then she could always hire another man next spring.

  “I'll take Ruth into town with me today,” she announced at breakfast one day in early April, “unless you two have other plans.”

  “Well, we were going to start building our playhouse, but that can wait until this afternoon,” Carl said, pouring himself a second cup of coffee.

  “You could help Rudy fix that wagon.”

  “I could,” Carl agreed. “Will you pick up the mail?”

  “I always do.”

  In the post office, Ruth waited patiently for the cocoa Amanda had promised her, amusing herself by passing her hand back and forth through the dust motes in a shaft of sunlight. The air inside was chilly and dank and smelled of wood and glue.

  “Spring's coming,” Ramona Mueller, the postmistress, said brightly. She'd said that to everyone who'd come in that day. It was a nice, safe thing to say.

  “I hope so,” Amanda said.

  Ramona was satisfied. Most people said something along those lines.

  Amanda picked up a page from an old circular and accordion-pleated it while she waited for Ramona to sort through the pile of mail behind the counter.

  “I hear Carl is better.”

  “Oh, yes, much better, thank you.”

  “He's lucky he's got you to help out with Ruth.”

  Amanda flushed. Helping Carl with Ruth? Was that how they saw it? That wasn't how it was at all. “Well, a girl needs a mother,” she said finally.

  While the women talked, Ruth, placing her feet precisely heel to toe, so as to follow the path of a single floorboard, made her way to the low-hung window at the front of the post office. An automobile was rolling slowly up the street. Ruth's experience with motorcars was limited, and she'd never seen one like this, with a special seat in the rear for riding backward. When the car stopped, the boy in this seat stood up, bent his knees, and jumped to the ground, his unbuttoned coat flying out behind him like a cape. He waited beside the car then, polis
hing its bright black flank with his sleeve, until the man who'd been driving came around. Together they started up the steps of the post office, and Ruth hurried back to stand beside Amanda.

  “I guess this is it,” Ramona said as she laid a small pile of catalogs and bills on the counter. “No letters today.”

  Amanda put the mail in her basket and turned to go, taking Ruth by the hand. Just then the door flew open, admitting a rush of fresh April air. Amanda's heart seized as if it might stop beating right there in the middle of the United States post office.

  The man in the doorway smiled at her slightly, the corners of his mouth twitching and his eyes crinkling fondly, as if they shared a private joke. “Amy,” he said.

  Amanda looked at the floor for a moment in confusion. Finally, relying on convention, she gave Ruth a little tug, so that the child stood between her and the man.

  “Say how do you do to Mr. Owens, Ruthie.”

  “Hajya do,” Ruth said obediently, but she meant it for the boy. He was older than she, which would have been enough to make him interesting, but something else about him fascinated her. He was wearing a pair of glasses, very small to fit his face and very round. Ruth hadn't thought that children could wear glasses. She wanted to try them on. Did things look different from behind them?

  The boy looked down at her through his two windows rimmed in gold. “Hi,” he said, sticking his hand out importantly, “I'm Arthur.”

  “Clement Owens,” the postmistress sang out from behind her counter. “You've got so much mail, I hardly know where to put it all.”

  “Well, here I am to pick it up,” he said, but he continued to stand just inside the door. “I'd been hoping to run into you sometime, Amy. I have to thank you.”